Review: Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell

 I've been reading several books about the U-2 incident, Francis Gary Powers, and the incident's effect on U.S. policy.  Fallout from the debacle was considerable. Khrushchev was eager to spend less on the military. He wanted to bring the fruits of capitalism, washing machines, etc. to the USSR, and they would not be able to if military spending continued apace. The Summit with Eisenhower was coming up, and he and Eisenhower (who had his own suspicions and pressure from the "military-industrial complex" he was to warn about) both wanted to cool things down. When Power's plane was shot down, the Russian's suspected the flight was a deliberate provocation to prevent the Summit. Indeed, after that the pressure on Khrushchev increased. Kennedy had been elected on a bogus missile gap charge, and he was also anxious to prove he "had balls."  So it's not unreasonable to suggest that the Berlin Wall and moving missiles to Cuba were a direct result of pressure on Khrushchev to be tougher on the U.S.  

I just had to read this book after seeing Tom Hank's brilliant performance in the eponymous movie (a must-watch.) The movie focuses primarily on the role of James Donovan, Abel/Fischer's, lawyer, while Whittell's excellent book looks at events from the perspectives of other participants: Powers' wife, his relatives, espionage in the fifties and sixties, the technology of the U-2, and Vogel, the East German lawyer, who played a key role in getting not just Powers exchanged but also Fred Pryor, a PhD economics student who got caught up in East Berlin just as the wall was going up.

A depressing feature of the book is the information that defense in both countries had an interest in keeping the Cold War alive since they profited from it greatly.  The book also points out the need for accurate intelligence to help make informed decisions, although here, that intelligence was made available by the U-2, but its use was thwarted by the incident because of pressures from the military.

The technology has changed dramatically since then, more importantly, we no longer need pilots for our intelligence-gathering aircraft. Satellites, drones, and cyber warfare are far more important. Spy satellites are able to discern minute details of anything on Earth from their orbits high above Earth. Whether all that raw information is processed and used properly and without undue influence is another matter.

A fascinating, page-turner of a book.

Review: Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

 

This is the book Trump should have tried to ban. Forget Bolton et al. It reveals the incestuous relationship between a bank, Russia, money laundering, and its most famous client. The bank that Donald Trump came to rely on to subsidize his shrinking empire after banks in the US refused to loan him money, having been stiffed  by him too often.  He had a habit of just not repaying the loans.(A running joke is that Donald had written many books on making deals and business, but they all ended with Chapter 11.)

 

The bank itself, after having been taken over by US traders, was getting into trouble by emphasizing short-term profits through ever-increasing levels of risk. Traders were paid by the estimated return on a bet, usually using derivatives which formerly had been better used to lower risk. They would often over-estimate the return knowing that their compensation would not be adjusted downward if the bet failed to return their estimate.  Many were earning millions every year in bonuses.

 

Steve Bannon, quoted in Fire and Fury, noted that the Trump family was all about cash. Eric Trump had been quoted as saying they could get all the money they needed from Russia, and Bannon (who himself has been charged with stealing money from Wall donors) saw the insatiable appetite for money that the Trump family had. Bannon"s story was interesting in itself. He had been a trader at Goldman Sachs, but his father had suffered financial collapse in 2008 and that turned Bannon into a flaming revenge artist vowing to get the eastern bankers, i.e. a standard economic populist. He allied himself with Trump's populist rhetoric.

 

It gets even messier as Enrich lays out the connections between Justin Kennedy to the Trump family. In case anyone has forgotten, Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Anthony Kennedy, Justin's father, who interceded with Trump on Kavanaugh’s behalf. The banks affairs became so entangled that there were several suicides of bank officers and lawyers who despaired of unethical and illegal machinations. Greed and money laundering would appear to be at the heart of much modern finance and Trump was right in the middle.

 

The all consuming emphasis on profit meant that traders would go anywhere, to any country, that needed hard currency.  Since most of the world's trades were conducted in US dollars, much of those transactions occurred through New York. And since Deutsche was trading with rogue countries under US sanction, like Iran, Syria, and Russia, interest was aroused in intelligence and legal quarters.  When it became apparent that US soldiers were being killed in Iraq by weapons used by terrorists being supported by Iran, the families of the dead soldiers filed suit against Deutsche.  Following the fall of the Soviet Union, money laundering became endemic and an audit revealed that Russian mafia money was pouring into the US through Deutsche's Eastern Europe connections, most of it being washed in New York's lucrative  luxury real estate market. Guess who was a big player in that market?

 

After the crash of 2008, caused in large part by the risky bets using unusual financial instruments of big banks, especially Deutsche, country leaders looked to those bank leaders for advice.  In Germany, Merkle went to Ackerman, head of Deutsche whose advice profited no one more than Deutsche itself.

 

Without going into too much detail and having no desire to spoil a great story, thousands of emails from a Deutsche banker who had committed suicide fell into the hands of reporters.  They revealed that the loans Trump had personally guaranteed (meaning the bank could go after his personal wealth should he default on the huge number of loans he had with them) had been layered off to a Russian bank, meaning that the loans were actually coming from the Russians.  (Remember that Eric Trump had bragged his family could get all the money they wanted from the Russians.)  So you had a situation where a new American president owed millions of dollars to a Russian bank that was controlled by the KGB.

 

A fascinating, if disturbing, read.  Stay tuned, the story continues.

 

Review: Baptism: A Vietnam Memoir by Larry Gwin

 

It seems that recently there has been a flood of Vietnam memoir books.  Those of you born after 1965 can now turn your interests elsewhere.  For a baby boomer, like me, born in 1947, Vietnam was an all-consuming, ever-present, presence. We could not escape it effects. It permeated our lives, dictated careers, education, relationships, everything. We worried about getting drafted, philosophized about religious beliefs not to mention our feelings about imperialism and war and America's role in the world. (Obviously, we learned nothing, and the chickenhawks went onto rule and then make more mistakes than the "best and the brightest."

 

Anyway, I'm pleased that publishing one's memoirs and recollections has become so much easier.  Most are not literature although there are some very good books o come out of all wars, I expect, like Matterhorn, Red Flags,and many others.  I've been reading many. Obviously each GI's experience was different so to look for an"average" experience is ridiculous. All of them are fascinating. This one was no exception.

 

Gwin had joined ROTC at Yale, mostly because all of his predecessors had fought in an American war, even if one had been on the Confederate side. Commissioned after graduation he was sent to Vietnam as part of the advisors (this was in 1965+) before things got totally out-of-hand. I graduated in 1969 when things were definitely murky, but as you'll see the quagmire was already forming in '65.  Anti-vaXXers take note, you will not like the military.  They give shots for everything. "We got our gamma globulin shots the next day, at the naval hospital across town. Five cc's in each cheek for the big guys like me. I spent the afternoon in bed, on my stomach, waiting for the pain to go away. We'd received by that time the full gamut of immunizations, shots for cholera, typhus, yellow fever, and plague." Unfortunately, no shots for malaria.

 

After six boring weeks with ARVN (filled with the need for Kaopectate, otherwise known as GI cement, for his dysentery) that conveyed a sense that the Vietnamese army was doing its best to avoid the enemy, Gwin was transferred to the 1st Air Cavalry Division, not a pleasant new job, as he had witnessed how vulnerable helicopters were.

 

Larry Gwin was not a sniper, not tunnel rat, nor anything unusual. "He was a conventional soldier in a conventional unit doing conventional things. His story will hit home with the vast majority of readers who, like him, are more or less conventional."* But perhaps that makes him, and those like him, extraordinary.

Gwin is unsparing in recounting events you'd never see in a John Wayne book or movie. On one mission the plane ferrying his entire 3rd platoon, some forty plus men, crashed on take-off, everyone was killed, and Gwin was tasked with trying to help identify bodies that had been reconstructed by the unsung heroes of the GRU (Graves Registration Unit). A searing memory.

 

The strategy was unsustainable.  Send patrols out to scour for the enemy, i.e. get used as bait, call in artillery and air support to kill them, and then return to base, leaving the enemy to return to where he was. If you run across a hamlet, destroy it, after sending all those of fighting age back to base. "It made me angry. Who the hell were we to march in and disrupt this hamlet—march in, tear it up looking for weapons, drag everyone out of their homes like Gestapo in the night, and send the men off somewhere to be interrogated? Maybe it was necessary. Maybe not. Who knew? ... After the Hueys flew away, we picked up and continued southward, leaving the village behind us. But the wailing of those poor, terrified women seemed to stay with me all day. ...A young boy, four or five years old, stood motionless near the door of a burning hootch. He stared at me as I walked by. His face expressionless. No tears. Nothing. He just stared. I'll never forget the look on his face." Perhaps not the best way to win the hearts and minds of the locals.

 

As an appalling aside, this is what President Bone Spurs said about Vietnam. "Trump sometimes bantered about Vietnam with radio host Howard Stern. He referred to trying to avoid sexually transmitted diseases on the dating scene as “my personal Vietnam.” “It’s pretty dangerous out there,” he said in 1993. “It’s like Vietnam.”  That is probably the most egregious insult to Vietnam Vets I have ever read.

 

Note that Gwin makes an appearance in Harold Moore's We were Solders Once and Young and there is a Youtube documentary on LZ X-Ray.

 

If you are looking for a company level commander memoir, I highly recommend  Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald. 

 

*https://www.historynet.com/book-review-baptism-a-vietnam-memoir-larry-gwin-vn.htm

 

 

Slavery and Federal Preemption: Prigg v Pennsylvania, 1842

The Prigg case has always been overshadowed by Dred Scott, yet in many ways, it was of equal importance. Edward Prigg had conspired with his neighbors to return a runaway slave and her children to her purported master in Maryland. Pennsylvania's law required a certificate from a magistrate to remove a slave to be sure that it was indeed a slave. In this case they were unable to get a certificate because there was doubt whether the woman was indeed enslaved.  The woman, Margaret Morgan, was considered to be free by the community and had been living as such for many years.  Indeed, she had been listed as a free black in the 1830 census. Her children had been born in Pennsylvania and were therefore free under Pennsylvania law.

Prigg and his companions seized the entire family and took them to Maryland after they were denied a certificate by a York County magistrate. They were charged with kidnapping but Maryland refused to extradite the conspirators. His conviction was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Pennsylvania law was unconstitutional given the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.

The opinion by Justice Story overturned Prigg’s conviction,  It (1) upheld the constitutionality of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law; (2) struck down Pennsylvania’s 1826 “personal liberty law,” and by implication all similar laws in other states; (3) declared that no state could pass any law that interfered with or supplemented the federal Fugitive Slave Law; (4) declared that masters or their agents had a common law right recapture their runaway slaves, without fulfilling any of the requirements of the federal Fugitive Slave Law; and (5) asserted that every state was morally obligated to help enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, but that Congress lacked the power to require the states to do so. 

The decision was unusual in that it was not unanimous.  There were multiple concurring opinions, most notably Chief Justice Taney,  but only one dissent, Justice McLean.  (He also dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision.)  It was clearly a strong pro-slavery opinion from a Justice who heretofore had been considered to be anti-slavery. 

The Prigg decision came to be overshadowed by Dred Scott, which had political ramifications, but Prigg would have been much more famous for its judicial implications. Two aspects of Story’s opinion touch on thoroughly modem constitutional issues: preemption and unfunded mandates. Story argued that the 1793 statute gave the federal government authority over state actions  and said that since it was an interstate action, even in the absence of a federal law, federal would preempt state. (Whether the federal government would have enforced a non-existent statute to return slaves to the south, was another issue; Jackson was president at the time who probably would have, but JQ Adams, Jackson’s predecessor, most notably, would not have.)

Story also held that in the absence of the 1793 law, Article IV, Section 2 would take precedent over state law making the Fugitive Slave Clause, as that section is known, self-executing. *

Upon this ground we have not the slightest hesitation in holding, that, under and in virtue of the Constitution, the owner of a slave is clothed with entire authority, in every state in the Union, to seize and recapture his slave, whenever he can do it without any breach of the peace, or any illegal violence. In this sense, and to this extent this clause of the Constitution may properly be said to execute itself; and to require no aid from legislation, state or national.

Story also ruled that while the 1793 Act provided for federal jurisdiction, it could not force the states to enforce it, i.e. it was an unfunded mandate. This provided an excuse for northern states to ignore the 1793 Act ** creating pressure for the new Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which made the federal government responsible for enforcement providing for a federal commissioner in every county in the United States.  The pro-slavery states triumphed once again in the guise of Story’s constitutional nationalism. Even though he abhorred slavery, he believed that the national Constitution provided national guarantees. That his decision resulted in the 1850 law and that he provided a mechanism for its enforcement (federal commissioners) and Dred Scott is another of history’s ironies and unintended consequences.

*Article IV, Sec. 2 of the Constitution

• A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.

• No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

** For example, “Latimer Law” passed in Massachusetts forbade the use of state facilities in fugitive slave cases. Other states passed similar acts, and many state judges refused, on their own, to hear cases under 1793 law.

Review: Never Go Back by Lee Child

"Nothing happens in the movies that doesn't happen in real life." (Really? Living Dead?  Zombies? Godzillas?) One of the most ridiculous comments ever made, and made by someone who, apparently having nothing else to do, had read through Reacher's file -- begun on him before age six when, at a special screening put on by Army Psy-Ops, he attacked a monster on the screen with a switchblade. Age six mind you.  Apparently, they loved his instant aggression, when all the other kids recoiled in fear.

Such an implausible story. Reacher, who never seems to lack for funds and always has cash on hand, (or just happens on his version of an ATM, a burning meth lab) travels across multiple states to visit Major Susan Turner, the commander of his old outfit, because he liked the sound of her voice. Then it turns out he is the object of a huge conspiracy that he, of course, solves forthwith after having been reinstated into the army. It would seem none of the new brass, including his JAG lawyers like him -- I can understand why, he's about the most abrasive personality ever -- but the non-coms all seem to fawn over him. He also remembers the smallest details of those who had served under him even after 16 years and knows what they are currently up to in spite of his peripatetic lifestyle with no home base, nor cell phone, etc. Banking for him must be a nightmare.

He insists he likes women, has as many affairs as possible, has no kids or responsibilities, yet when faced with a possible paternity issue from 16 years before (the timeline issue is another problem for me) he reveals little interest in the child.

Reacher has got to be the least likable paladin (I really hate to denigrate Richard Boone's character but don't want to call Reacher a hero.)  He's what one critic described as a "good" psychopath because he kills loads of people, but theoretically only those who "deserve" to die, so those of us in the audience rooting for the vigilante, are supposed to like him.

I think he's one of the most boring characters in any series.  He doesn't read, seemingly has no interests,  and evinces no interest in anything nor the least bit of introspection. At least Lisbeth Salamander She knows herself,  explaining to her rapist, as she’s about to take revenge, ‘Keep in mind that I’m crazy, won’t you.’ And yet, we read on, wondering what anti-social act is just around the corner. Feel free to skim. You'll miss little.